In The Oath, Alfred Tarazi goes beyond the mere presentation of his work, to propagate an idea in order to involve the audience in suggestions, memories and visual stimulation. With the works presented in this first solo exhibition at The Running Horse, Alfred creates an all-encompassing sensory experience that invites the audience to relive certain fragments from the past in a carefully orchestrated exhibition.

Although the works might seem more abstract, all the elements of Alfred’s work remain recognisable and fit in in his bigger scheme of a war memorial for all the victims. Flex, paper rolls, spools, sound, silk-screens all come together to tell the story of a country’s bloody past through the eyes of a boy who stands alone in a scouts outfit holding a cat and looks at a country going through the last agonies of an internecine war and facing an uncertain future.

Alfred combines all the scattered fragments of collective and personal memories in an attempt to rearrange the chaos, to somehow make sense of senseless acts of violence. But uncertainty is unavoidable. What is the purpose of those recurring scenes and imagery? Is it a difficulty to reconcile with a country at peace but that did not mourn its dead? How can one tackle unresolved scars? The works might not offer an answer but reflect a reality where answers and coming to terms with the past are still out of reach.

Yet through the evolution of technique, new exploration of media, and a constant momentum to find new ways of materialising a concept, Alfred remains socially and politically engaged with a constantly evolving visual language.

In The Oath, Alfred Tarazi goes beyond the mere presentation of his work, to propagate an idea in order to involve the audience in suggestions, memories and visual stimulation. With the works presented in this first solo exhibition at The Running Horse, Alfred creates an all-encompassing sensory experience that invites the audience to relive certain fragments from the past in a carefully orchestrated exhibition.

Although the works might seem more abstract, all the elements of Alfred’s work remain recognisable and fit in in his bigger scheme of a war memorial for all the victims. Flex, paper rolls, spools, sound, silk-screens all come together to tell the story of a country’s bloody past through the eyes of a boy who stands alone in a scouts outfit holding a cat and looks at a country going through the last agonies of an internecine war and facing an uncertain future.

Alfred combines all the scattered fragments of collective and personal memories in an attempt to rearrange the chaos, to somehow make sense of senseless acts of violence. But uncertainty is unavoidable. What is the purpose of those recurring scenes and imagery? Is it a difficulty to reconcile with a country at peace but that did not mourn its dead? How can one tackle unresolved scars? The works might not offer an answer but reflect a reality where answers and coming to terms with the past are still out of reach.

Yet through the evolution of technique, new exploration of media, and a constant momentum to find new ways of materialising a concept, Alfred remains socially and politically engaged with a constantly evolving visual language.

THE OATH

Sometimes I do not understand what pulls me there…

Why go back to the civil war?

Why think about the civil war?

Yet, no matter what happens, I feel constantly compelled to look back at this past, to think about it, and ultimately to make some sense out of it.

People often like to reflect upon their childhoods.

My childhood is the war.

As a child, there are specific moments when you believe you are starting to understand the strange and mysterious life of adults; key moments when the world starts making sense and you understand what a nation is, what a government does, and why men in uniforms can be so compelling.

As a child, everyday is an initiation to understand the codes and rules of civil life. As a child, my initiation was to understand the codes and rules of war.

If I were to write the story of that war, factually, as it happened, I would prove to be absolutely unable to. The events that happened, in their very succession, would have been absolutely inconceivable to me…

What a demented playwright at work do we see here!

But this story has been written by many and has been ignited and fed by the aspirations of many. For an outcome I can barely comprehend the main characters of this story have gambled everything, including their very lives and the lives of their loved ones.

Men die, have died, and will always die. Conflicts have marked the history of mankind, and in conflicts, men are sacrificed, killed, and tortured…

And after the war, we count the dead, look for the missing, and heal our wounds through forgetfulness… Often the dead at war are reduced to heaps of faceless corpses, nameless bodies. We estimate, go through mass graves, and try to understand what lead to the carnage.

But for every death there is a story…

There I go…I must go through this painful timeline, and count the dead…and each tragic death must have its dignity back, its name back, its identity, and its story must be known by all…The history of the civil war has been punctuated by more than two hundred thousand unfortunate encounters between men and bullets, and shrapnel, and fire, and knives, and every imaginable way of inflicting mortal damage on a body.

What will happen to those two hundred thousand stories of pain, blood, and resentment?

Today I stage my past, and I cut my way through it hoping to rescue as many stories as I can. It is not souls I aim to rescue, but stories, written in blood.

And to all who still ask why, I answer: I have grown up amidst your wars, amidst your murderous madness…I have seen the blazing corpses of children, set ablaze by your bombs, and while gazing at those flaming bodies I grew aware at that very moment that I was a survivor, and as a survivor, as a child from the war who has been spared from your madness, I would grow up with the enraged accusing frightened eyes of that child and I will ask justice for the others who have been killed.